One of my favorites was a customer who called in to ask if she needed a special kind of pen to sign the back of her credit card. She had tried several different styles but none of them would show up because the signature line was too dark.

She had been trying to sign on the mag stripe.

You should have told her that her checks were outstanding but she needs to improve.

I sometimes get calls from customers at home (Community Bank= customer service) It amazes me that some of them can remember my last name to look me up in the phone directory but still can't get my first name right (Becky, Betty, Barbara, Boss Lady, What's her name, " Betsy? No-that doesn't sound right..."

We had a customer who claimed her ATM card didn't work. Turns out she was standing in front of the machine waving it back and forth. Didn't understand the whole swipe process.

After I graduated from college (in the early 90s), I worked in a bank in that same town for a couple of years. Once we had an issue with one of our customer's checks. She was an art student, and decided that she didn't like the look of any of the checks we offered. So, she designed her own and "drew" the MICR line on there. It looked reasonably good considering she drew those MICR numbers by hand. But, she just couldn't understand why the bank's systems couldn't read the MICR line on her lovely checks!

As a long-time loan officer in a previous incarnation, a loan interview inquiry into the collateral that the applicant proposed to offer on some of the hair-brained loan requests fielded through the years elicited some really silly responses.

Aunt Agnes' Buick without her permission, real dinosaur bones, boob jobs, cubic zirconia masquerading as diamonds, emus, live rattlesnakes as part of "rattlesnake products," and a '71 Plymouth Fury station wagon with a 12-inch hackberry tree growing up out of the opened hood of the engine compartment all come to mind without much effort to recall.

The silliest however are the inevitable unsecured loan requests constantly made by the "debt-fearless" for all sorts of wild amounts and for all sorts of wild purposes.

Like the loan request to make payments on another loan with another bank

My customer started with this exact logic but then took it a step further... since she had checks left, she wrote one payable to the Bank for $100, handed it to me, and asked me to deposit it into her checking account... so she could withdraw the $100 she was looking for in the first place.

No, sorry lady, it STILL doesn't work like that.

You guys are killing me!!!

Yeah, that hoary old one too!

Not humorously silly but probably the silliest of all are the credit card consolidation requests, doubly so when they are off-loaded into a home-equity loan so that the customer is free to "load 'em up" all over again.

Seen it happen, once with a fellow bank staff member. She was denied but went to the next town and obtained the home equity loan with the bank in which my wife was employed at the time. Ran 'em right back up to stratospheric heights again, she did. Didn't take but a year or so either!

That's silly in itself, to be married and be bankers at different banks. We've both changed institutions since the above home equity loan request occurred but we still work for competitive lending institutions. Guess what we don't want to discuss at the dinner table?

Years ago I worked for Household Bank, a sister to Household Finance. Which we were in the same city just blocks from each other.

Often had customers want to make their HFC payments, we would tell them they would need to take the payment to HFC, and they would argue, "But your name is Household." We would say, Yes Household BANK not FINANCE. You need to go 2 blocks down to the HFC office.

They would throw their arms up and hissy fit out.


Then like I mentioned earlier, they would have accounts with each of us, take an advance from our LOC to make a payment to HFC, then the next month take a advance from HFC and pay us...

I had a customer list a $25 check with a $100 less cash on a deposit slip for a net deposit of -$75. Really? a negative deposit?

Wait until they start making positive withdrawals! Those crazy people.

My favorite stories tend to come from the collections world. The people that didn't realize they had to pay borrowed money back, or couldn't make their credit card payment because they had to go on vacation and used up all their money. There are lots of good ones, most aren't PC enough to be posted without getting the thread shut down though

We had a customer deposit $300 in an ATM (it actually was only $3) and proceeded to withdraw $300 in which they really did not have. We discovered it Monday and called the customer to ask why they only deposited $3. He proceeded to tell us that he didn't do it and it was his girlfriend. We said we can verify it was you because we see you on the video. He replied "No, I had a stocking cap on." Our ops person responded "That maybe true but you pulled the stocking cap over your face AFTER you did the deposit" and show him the footage.

The look on his face was priceless!

Does a customer calling and asking if we would take care of their cat because they were out on the window ledge with a butter knife count?

I still don't know what they were doing out there?

A customer once assured me that none of her checks could ever be forged because as soon as she got them in the mail, she signed every single one of them.

We had a person apply for a loan and during the conversation ask "How much is the payment going to be with the late fee?"

Made that decision easy.

not quite a customer but at one bank where we were robbed, the robber brought a paper bag so small that the teller had to bend the moneyto fit it in.

Good one that.

I once went to a borrower's residence in the outer reaches of the bank's trade area to repossess their new '87 Camaro they'd only had for 90 days. Don't now recall exactly how the conversation went down but the wife allowed that: "they really didn't know if they could afford the car or not when they bought it but thought they'd go ahead and buy it to find out."

Doing dealer recourse paper when the owner of the local Chevrolet dealership sat as a rather imperious member on the bank's board of directors netted perhaps more than the usual number of silly auto loans.

Low expectations.

The Magic Briefcase

We had a variation on the same theme once when a crazy loon was berating our cashier over the claim that the bank had lost the 1.2 million in cash that he'd recently deposited into a new account which we had no record of opening. She knew he was a loon but was caught in her office with him getting more and more worked up with contrived anger and indignation. Concerned with her safety, I blundered into this fiasco. He repeated his story of opening this account to me, saying he'd brought the money into the bank in the same standard-sized briefcase he was then holding in his lap. When I inquired about the denominations of the cash with which he'd opened this account he belligerently stated that it had been fives, tens, and twenties.

I excused myself to call in law enforcement who finished sorting him out.

I had a teller approached by a "customer" with a note: I need $1500. She told him he had to apply for a loan. He argued he just wanted the money. She refused and the would-be-robber left.

I think something like that is still an offense. Years ago we had a guy come in to cash his paycheck. He handed the teller his paycheck and ID, and while she was running it, he said "give me all your money". When she asked what he said, he said he was just joking and wanted to see if she was paying attention. Well, it still rattled her, and it turned out to be some sort of criminal offense. Of course we had his name and DL info from the check, so the police went and picked him up.

this note says you have a gub, what is a gub?

a gub? it says gun.

no, it clearly says gub...

honestly, I have always found his movies to be slow, but that was definitely funny

At a Bank I used to work for, we had a gentleman come in one morning to apply for a personal loan for $812. He said, with a straight face, that it was so he could pay his drug dealer money he owed him. The loan was denied, so later that afternoon he came back in with a note demanding exactly $812 and passed it to a teller. He got the money and ran out the door. It was very simple for the police to track him down because the manager recognized him from when he was in that morning and of course, we had everything we needed to know about him from the loan application!

fixed